Geezer Needs Help With New P35 Boxes

[TitleistProV1]

Thank you in advance for your assistance:

My son is going off to college, so part of the deal is a new PC, and with me doing a lot of video encoding these days, my 4 year old system is hopeless. So I am building two of them. He is a computer science major, at least for now, who plays games and I do a lot of video editing and number crunching.

Here is the plan at this point:

Antec 900 (purchased)
1 gets a Silverstone 750, the other an 850 (purchased)
150 GB Raptor HD in each. (more HD based on info below)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P for him
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 for me
($$$ is the issue here, I want to OC the board and CPU, and Matrix Raid it. He needs fast). I am starting to think the DQ6 is not worth it over the DS3P
2 GB Ram each (4GB if cheap RAM is okay to use)
radeon X1950 Video card in each (best bang for buck IMO)
Biggest processor I can afford (my first thought was 6800's, I'm not sure now)
XP at first, Vista after SP1 and more good apps for it.


That seems to me to be a good set up, but:

1. If I got more HD's can I just Matrix raid the other HD's and not the Raptor? Should I?
2. Can you Raid with a SATA drive and an IDE drive?
3. How can you determine the best bang for the buck with ram, it would be great to put big time$$$$$ RAM in, but I'm not made of $$$$.
4. What processor after late July cuts?
5. Any recommendations of video cards?
6. Finally, I probably will have to get at least one SATA DVD Burner. Where can I find reviews of Burners so I can get a good, fast, dual layer burner?

Thanks again for your help.

 

[jpeyton]

Originally posted by: TitleistProV1
Antec 900 (purchased)
1 gets a Silverstone 750, the other an 850 (purchased)
150 GB Raptor HD in each. (more HD based on info below)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P for him
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 for me
($$$ is the issue here, I want to OC the board and CPU, and Matrix Raid it. He needs fast). I am starting to think the DQ6 is not worth it over the DS3P
2 GB Ram each (4GB if cheap RAM is okay to use)
radeon X1950 Video card in each (best bang for buck IMO)
Biggest processor I can afford (my first thought was 6800's, I'm not sure now)
XP at first, Vista after SP1 and more good apps for it.

If you have not purchased the Raptors, I STRONGLY advise you not to. The difference in real world performance is small. The best drives speed/capacity wise on the market are the 500GB drives from Western Digital, Samsung, and Seagate. You can't go wrong with any of them.

Just get a pair of DS3Rs; as you said, the DQ6 is not worth it.

4GB RAM would be worth it in your situation for video editing, but only if you end up going with Vista 64-bit as your OS. For gaming and school, 2GB is fine.

Agreed; X1950s are the best bang for the buck.

XP 32-bit is still my OS of choice. But Vista's 64-bit version is a lot better than XP's 64-bit version.

1. If I got more HD's can I just Matrix raid the other HD's and not the Raptor? Should I?
2. Can you Raid with a SATA drive and an IDE drive?
3. How can you determine the best bang for the buck with ram, it would be great to put big time$$$$$ RAM in, but I'm not made of $$$$.
4. What processor after late July cuts?
5. Any recommendations of video cards?
6. Finally, I probably will have to get at least one SATA DVD Burner. Where can I find reviews of Burners so I can get a good, fast, dual layer burner?

1. No you shouldn't RAID 0 period. The difference in real world performance, as confirmed by numerous industry publications, is small and not worth the additional cost, risk, or difficulty.
2. No. And see my answer to question 1.
3. The good thing about Core 2 setups is that you don't need expensive RAM at all. I recommend most people stick to DDR 667. You can regularly find 2GB DDR2 667 (name brands like Kingston or Corsair) for under $50 after rebate. Look at Outpost.com for deals.
4. Depends on your budget. In the under $150, I would get a E4400 for $113. In the $150-$200, I would get the E6550 for $163. In the over $200, the only good option is the Q6600 for $266. The quad might help a lot with video encoding, but I doubt your son needs it for gaming or CS classes.
5. Gaming on a budget: ATI X1950PRO or X1950GT; both can be had for under $110 after rebate. Otherwise go for a 8800GTS 320MB; $260 after rebate. If you don't game, get a cheap nVidia 8500GT.
6. Off the top of my head, the best reviewed ones on Newegg are the Samsung and the NEC.

 

[Markbnj]

Is your son capable of maintaining the machine, including altering the overclock settings if necessary, and trouble-shooting the rest of it? If not, I would just get him a Dell or something, with an 800 number he can call.

I don't think you get much bang for the buck out of better/faster ram, personally. RAM access is so much faster than every other form of I/O in the system (except register-to-register or cache fetches on the CPU), that no matter how fast the ram is you're going to be waiting on disk, or peripherals, or the network, or the video card.

On the video card, for him an 8xxx series nVidia will provide the most current longevity in gaming. For what you do you can get by with much less, maybe even a 7800.

Lastly, I wouldn't RAID up his drives, for reasons that have been discussed a lot here. It's more fragile and isn't usually considered a performance enhancing mechanism.